Sessions at MobX 2011 on Friday 18th November

Love it or hate it, the introduction of the iPhone did completely reshape the mobile landscape. Peter Sikking, involved in mobile user interaction since 1997, would like to take this opportunity to review the world of ‘old mobile’: the environment in which it was designed; the interaction architectural aspects. What is valid and what has become obsolete in the ‘new mobile order’ that started with the launch of the iPhone?

Part two starts with the day of today and looks to the future. Does old mobile have a chance? What about hybrid, touch and type, devices? Peter looks at it, as always, from the architectural point of view.

"There's no such thing as a mobile strategy, it's just strategy" is the battle cry of those daring enough to utter it in client debriefings and public arenas. It's bold, controversial and perhaps most of all, a little self-indulgent.

Mobile no longer exists as a side note in the margins of corporate strategy or as the sole domain of the "innovative". Mobile is mainstream, pervasive and socially well understood. Most importantly, with the sheer volume and advancement of portable devices on the market, the term "mobile" is now, finally, being understood appropriately as "mobility".

Conversations about user interface and apps give way to discussions of situation, continuity, adaptation, narrative, and integration. Devices become the lens, rather than the canvas. However, with this broader and more strategic focus, it can become hard to see the forest through the trees when starting design engagements. In this talk, Rod shares his company's recent successes, learnings and challenges with this new problem: multi-screen experience strategy. From frameworks through to design practice, Rod discusses some of his recent work across Social TV, telecommunications, airline carriers and financial services.

With the rise of the smartphone, customers now expect products, services and information to be available to them whether they are sitting at their desk or sitting by the pool. And the smartphone is not the only game in town: tablet devices are also rapidly emerging as another touchpoint from which users are demanding access. It's one thing to mobilize design, but it's another thing to think about how a suite of touchpoints fits together into a meaningful and useful customer experience. Armed with examples and guidelines, Gabriel White will share hands-on tips for creating compelling and effective multi-device user experiences.

The interfaces we're building need to work in distracting environments. And we need to figure out how to cope with users' tendency to get distracted. This presentation will look at how we might achieve that. It will cover the psychology of distraction - what is distraction? Is it beneficial? Can we predict when and where users are likely to get distracted? Thus far, most designers have either chosen to accept distraction or to tackle it by 'turning up the heat' and being more distracting than everyone else. The presentation will explore alternative strategies - minimising distraction and facilitating recovery. User experience is changing: where our main issue was users' comprehension we're increasingly fighting for users' attention. I'll explore the techniques we need to achieve that.

The mythical mobile user who's always distracted and in a rush doesn't always, or even usually, exist. Yet too often we design for that context, creating mobile apps and websites as lite versions of desktop counterparts. Instead, mobile apps should almost always do MORE than their desktop counterparts. "Tapworthy" author Josh Clark explains the difficult craft of designing simple interfaces for complex mobile apps, sharing techniques that will make your mobile efforts future friendly.

Picture the iPhone's home screen. There are many actions you can take there, but only one of them (tapping an icon) is in any way visible. What happened to discoverability? It used to be that good UI design practice was that you make everything findable: we had icons with tooltips, menu bars with labels, affordances. Affordances: remember those? Those were nice. Quaint perhaps. Now we don't even have scrollbars! Our features vanish into gestures users will never remember and are impossible to find. How can we design in this new era of non-discoverabilty? What is it doing to our users, to our products, to UI design? This talk will explore those topics, and suggest a way forward.

With reliable data connectivity and powerful hardware capabilities phones are now small computers. However, how people interact with them is fundamentally different and it is more important than ever to reduce overload and simplify the user experience. This may also be at odds with business managers who want to add new features in an attempt to compete in the market. This presentation and workshop explains the importance of 'Microexperiences' and provides guidance and tools to help reduce the complexity of your mobile UI and still remain competitive.

Design (or if you prefer—user experience) is at a crossroads. In our globalized, hyper-connected world, users no longer need to wait for us to create experiences for them. As we debate the value of design thinking, the usefulness of the next API, or strive to craft the ultimate cross-platform experience—users are sorting this out on their own, using whatever service or technology is “good enough” for them at the time.

Strategies and scenarios that made sense mere months ago, are disintegrating as technologies shift, business models crumble, and we watch with dismay as users exchange tips to disable JavaScript on their Kindles, or access multiplayer Flash games on the iPads.

What happens to your brand, your product, and your bottom line when users choose “good enough”, over your carefully crafted product or service? Is it a sign of failure, a missed opportunity, or a chance to dive head first towards a new reality?

For years, we've been telling designers: the web is not print. You can't have pixel-perfect layouts. You can't determine how your site will look in every browser, on every platform, on every device. We taught designers to cede control, think in systems, embrace web standards. So why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will "live" on a web page? Why do we give in when they demand a WYSIWYG text editor that works "just like Microsoft Word"? Worst of all, why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? What worked for the desktop web simply won't work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. Karen will talk about how we have to adapt to creating more flexible content.